Mass production of a product from its various components is well known, especially within the automotive industry. Typically, many of the components are prefabricated at one location and transported to another site for final assembly into the finished product. For an automobile seat, it is common practice for the seat to be completely prefabricated at one location, mounted on a supporting base such as a pallet, transported to the final assembly site, subsequently off-loaded from a shipping vehicle, and transferred to the final assembly line where the seat is removed from the support base and assembled into the final vehicle.
A current trend in the automotive industry is to increase passenger room within the vehicle cabin. This is particularly of interest in the luxury vehicle market. Increased cabin space is typically accompanied by wider seats which in turn promote driver and passenger comfort.
An undesirable consequence of wider vehicle seats is that the overall width of a seat assembly may exceed the width of its shipping supporting base or pallet. As will be appreciated, seat assembly ends or sides that extend beyond the width of a pallet are prone to damage from impact or contact with a variety of surfaces and structures that may be encountered during shipping. This is particularly so if the seat ends are exposed or otherwise unprotected.
A solution to this problem is to increase the width of the shipping supporting base or pallet. By increasing the width of the supporting base such that it is greater than the overall width of the seat assembly to be transported thereon, the potential for damage to the ends of the seat assembly can be significantly reduced. During shipping or transport, seat assemblies and corresponding pallets are frequently closely arranged to one another. As a consequence, the edges of adjacent pallets are typically in contact with one another. So long as the seats do not extend beyond the pallet edges, the pallets themselves provide protective spacing between neighboring seat assemblies.
However, increasing the width of pallets impacts numerous aspects of the shipment process and shipping equipment. For example, increasing pallet width would alter the footprint of the pallet and thus likely impact many existing conveyor systems. As will be appreciated, modification of conveyor systems would be significant and costly. Moreover, replacing conventional pallets with larger or wider pallets would result in further significant costs.
Accordingly, a need exists for protecting vehicle seat assemblies during shipment, and particularly protecting such seat assemblies that have a width that exceeds the width of a support base or pallet upon which the seats are disposed during shipping.
Related to this need, it would also be desirable that such protection for seat assemblies be cost-effective and relatively inexpensive. Providing protective assemblies over seat ends is undesirable due to the added cost of such assemblies, the labor associated with covering seat ends with those assemblies, and removing the protective assemblies from seat ends.